Real Clear Politics: Rick Perry’s Oar in the Water

Running? Or cramping Mitt for the fun of it?

“‘It saddens me when sometimes my fellow Republicans duck and cover in the face of pressure from the left. Our party cannot be all things to all people,’ Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) said at a Republican party event in Louisiana today.
“‘Our opponents on the left are never going to like us, so let’s quit trying to curry favor with them!’”

WSJ: “The Accountable Care Fiasco”

“The Obama Administration is handing out waivers far and wide for its health-care bill, but behind the scenes the bureaucracy is grinding ahead writing new regulations. The latest example is the rule for Accountable Care Organizations that are supposed to be the crown jewel of cost-saving reform. One problem: The draft rule is so awful that even the models for it say they won’t participate…”

Joel Klein, Atlantic: Failure of American Schools

“Three years ago, in a New York Times article detailing her bid to become head of the American Federation of Teachers union, Randi Weingarten boasted that despite my calls for ‘radical reform’ to New York City’s school system, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and I had achieved only ‘incremental’ change. It seemed like a strange thing to crow about, but she did have something of a point. New York over the past nine years has experienced what Robert Schwartz, the academic dean of Harvard’s education school, has described as ‘the most dramatic and thoughtful set of large-scale reforms going on anywhere in the country,’ resulting in gains such as a nearly 20-point jump in graduation rates. But the city’s school system is still not remotely where it needs to be.

“That story holds more than true for the country at large. Nearly three decades after A Nation at Risk, the groundbreaking report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, warned of “a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people,” the gains we have made in improving our schools are negligible—even though we have doubled our spending (in inflation-adjusted dollars) on K–12 public education. On America’s latest exams (the National Assessment of Educational Progress), one-third or fewer of eighth-grade students were proficient in math, science, or reading. Our high-school graduation rate continues to hover just shy of 70 percent, according to a 2010 report by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, and many of those students who do graduate aren’t prepared for college. ACT, the respected national organization that administers college-admissions tests, recently found that 76 percent of our high-school graduates ‘were not adequately prepared academically for first-year college courses.’”

2) WILPF (Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom) lobbied for cuts in American deployment. 1979…Panetta was a keynoter at WILPF’s annual conference at UC-Santa Cruz where honors were given to Ava and Linus Pauling. On 4/11/1984, Panetta, in the Congressional Record, honored Lucy Haessler, a WILPF leader who opposed deployment of American missiles.

Aaron Klein, WND: Leon Panetta and the CIA

“CIA Director Leon Panetta, President Obama’s nominee for secretary of defense, once proposed allowing Congress to conduct spot checks at its discretion of the country’s sensitive intelligence agency.

“In 1987, Panetta, then a California congressman, introduced the CIA Accountability Act, which would have made the CIA subject to audits by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

“Panetta’s legislation would have allowed the comptroller general, who directs the GAO, to audit any financial transactions of the CIA and evaluate all of the agency’s activities either at his own initiative or at the request of the congressional intelligence committees.

“The CIA is the only government agency that contests the authority of the comptroller general to audit its activities, citing the covert aspects of its operations…”

Panetta also tied to Institute for Policy Studies

“…The Institute for Policy Studies, or IPS, has long faced criticism for positions some say attempt to undermine U.S. national security and for its cozy relationship with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

“A review of the voting record for Panetta, a member of Congress from 1977 to 1993, during the period in question shows an apparent affinity for IPS’s agenda…”

Heather MacDonald, NRO: “Secure Communities” Program

“…state-level developments seem marginal compared to the growing attack on the very premises of national immigration law. Last Friday, the Obama administration finally caved in to mounting pressure from immigration activists, Democratic politicians, big-city police chiefs, and newspaper editorial boards to gut the Secure Communities program, which runs the fingerprints of arrestees booked into local jails against federal immigration data bases. Secure Communities does not mandate that immigration agents actually do anything with the resulting information; it merely provides them with information, which they may or may not act upon. Much of the time, they do nothing.

“To which one can only respond: So what? Even if Secure Communities flagged for possible deportation only illegal aliens with no criminal records at all, it is impossible to see any injustice or illegality in the operation of the law — unless the country’s real immigration policy is that illegal aliens should never be deported absent extreme and unusual circumstances. And that is exactly the premise of the campaign against Secure Communities…

Breitbart: Medvedev Wants Obama Reelected

“…’I can tell you directly — I would like Barack Obama to be re-elected president of the United States maybe more than someone else,’ Medvedev said in an interview with the Financial Times whose full transcript was released by the Kremlin early Monday.

“‘If another person becomes US president then he may have another course,’ he said.

“‘We understand that there are representatives of a rather conservative wing there who are trying to achieve their political goals at the expense of inflaming passions in relation to Russia, among other things.

“‘But what use is criticising them? This is simply a way of achieving political goals.’

“Since being installed at the Kremlin by his mentor Vladimir Putin, known for his hawkish views, Medvedev has made improving ties with the United States a key plank of his foreign policies…”

George Will, WaPo: NATO – Potemkin Alliance

“America’s intervention in Libya’s civil war, the most protracted and least surreptitious assassination attempt in history, was supposed to last “days, not weeks,” but is in its fourth month and has revealed NATO to be an increasingly fictitious military organization. Although this war has no discernible connection with U.S. national security, it serves the national interest, in three ways. It is awakening some legislators to their responsibilities. It is refuting the pretense that the United Nations sets meaningful parameters to wars it authorizes — or endorses, which is quite different. And it is igniting a reassessment of NATO, a Potemkin alliance whose primary use these days is perverse: It provides a patina of multilateralism to U.S. military interventions on which Europe is essentially a free rider…”

Karen Sibert, MD, NYT: Lady Docs Only Work Part Time

“I’m a doctor and a mother of four, and I’ve always practiced medicine full time. When I took my board exams in 1987, female doctors were still uncommon, and we were determined to work as hard as any of the men.

“Today, however, increasing numbers of doctors — mostly women — decide to work part time or leave the profession. Since 2005 the part-time physician workforce has expanded by 62 percent, according to recent survey data from the American Medical Group Association, with nearly 4 in 10 female doctors between the ages of 35 and 44 reporting in 2010 that they worked part time.

“This may seem like a personal decision, but it has serious consequences for patients and the public.

Medical education is supported by federal and state tax money both at the university level — student tuition doesn’t come close to covering the schools’ costs — and at the teaching hospitals where residents are trained. So if doctors aren’t making full use of their training, taxpayers are losing their investment. With a growing shortage of doctors in America, we can no longer afford to continue training doctors who don’t spend their careers in the full-time practice of medicine. ..”

Mark Steyn, NRO: LibzGetReal

“Last week was a great week for lesbians coming out of the closet — coming out, that is, as middle-aged heterosexual men.

“On Sunday, Amina Arraf, the young vivacious Syrian lesbian activist whose inspiring blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus” had captured hearts around the world, was revealed to be, in humdrum reality, one Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old college student from Georgia. The following day, Paula Brooks, the lesbian activist and founder of the website LezGetReal, was revealed to be one Bill Graber, a 58-year-old construction worker from Ohio. In their capacity as leading lesbians in the Sapphic blogosphere, “Miss Brooks” and “Miss Arraf” were colleagues…”

“…I returned to the farm from leading a European military history tour, and experienced the following — mind you, after a number of thefts the month prior (barn, shop, etc.):

“1) I left my chainsaw in the driveway to use the restroom inside the house. Someone driving buy saw it. He slammed on the brakes, stole it, and drove off…

“2) On the next night, three 15-hp agriculture pumps on our farm were vandalized — all the copper wire was torn out of the electrical conduits. The repairs to each one might run $500; yet, the value of the wire could not be over $50.

3) A neighbor has a house for sale. It is unoccupied and rather isolated. I saw someone approach it on Friday, and drove over to ensure he was lawful. It was the owner’s assistant, who lamented that someone had just stolen all the new appliances out of the house — carting off the refrigerator, dishwasher, stove, and microwave…

I think the public would react in two different ways to the above occurrences — and such a dichotomy explains a lot why the nation has never been more divided…

Pajamas: OnLine Radicalization – Jihadi Forums

“…For converts to violent Islamism, the ideology that has motivated attacks ranging from 9/11 to the Fort Hood massacre, the Internet is the ultimate tool in their arsenal. It guides, educates, and provides a sense of community among the isolated Western followers of the path of jihadists.

“In particular, jihadi forums provide a one-stop shop for news, publications, and media. Though the forums lack the organized worldview of jihadi blogs, they do provide some of the strongest links bonding would-be terrorists to one another and to larger networks abroad.

“Among the jihadi forums, Ansar al-Mujahideen [AM] and its sister site Ansar al-Mujahiden English Forum [AMEF] provide a readily accessible example of the potential of websites in this genre…”

Hugh Hewitt’s Weekend Journal: Bookends of Islamic Expansion

Sam Solomon & Elias Al Maqdisi published their book in 2009; Hewitt played Janet Medford’s interview of Solomon yesterday. Solomon reminds us that swords and soldiers are one tactic endorsed by the Koran, immigration and the taking of neighborhoods is the second one and an obligation for wealthier Muslims. Mosques are stepping stones across the stream of a competing culture. And according to Mr. Steyn, the average Muslim family has six children, the average European between one and two.

“…Americans and Europeans have made countless accommodations to Muslim demands. They have included footbaths; high-decibel, five-times-daily calls to prayer; segregated male-female gym and swimming pool hours; halal food; workplace dispensations for handling pork products and for female head and face coverings; and special, public prayer rooms. Also, shari’ah-compliant financial transactions, the expunging of offensive likenesses of Mohammed or imagined depictions of Arabic characters that connote “Allah,” official swearings-in on Korans in place of customary Bibles, the neutralizing of official descriptive language about Islamists and the jihad, the revision of so-called offensive content in movies and television programs, the removal of representations of pigs from the public sphere, and many other acculturations to Muslim entreaties have all been made in the service of respecting Muslim religious beliefs and practices.

“To those in Western democracies, these accommodating actions appear, on the surface, to be little more than harmless civil gestures, respecting the needs of a growing religion in their midst and welcoming a new addition to their proud, multicultural tradition. Many Westerners pat themselves on the back for their liberal bent, their tolerance and their open-mindedness.

Little do they realize that this strategic pattern of demands is part of an insidious, 1,400-year-old proscription for Muslims that originates in the Koran and the Sunnah, the deeds of Mohammed….”

Andrew McCarthy, NRO: “Romney’s Religions Problem”

“Sharia is not about private faith, but public institutions.

“

Mitt Romney is said to be the early frontrunner in the GOP presidential sweepstakes. One rival, Newt Gingrich, is perceived as floundering in a swirl of unforced errors and staff insurrection. Yet when it comes to Islam, which will continue to matter mightily in the next administration, the frontrunner could learn a thing or two from the flounderer. The issue is not religion. It is the seditious Islamist political program…”

Washington Times: Obama Slammed by Net Roots

“As President Obama shifts increasingly into reelection mode, he is feeling persistent anger and discontent from the left as well as the right.

“White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer was heckled and booed Friday at the annual Netroots Nation conference in Minnesota, a gathering of liberal activists from the online political community. When Mr. Pfeiffer reminded the audience that the president championed an equal-pay law, the moderator replied, “Frankly we’re a little sick of hearing about that one.”

Global Cooling, UK Mail: Sun to Take a Nap

Michael Mann…give us back our money….

“The idea that the Sun could now be about to cause global COOLING seems bizarre, but it is not as outlandish as it seems. For there is some evidence that this has happened before – most notably three centuries ago when changes in the Sun appeared to be linked to a period of almost unprecedented cold.

“So could this be about to happen again? And what does this mean for the great climate change thesis?

“At an American Astronomical Association conference this week in New Mexico, three groups of scientists who study the Sun reported on a missing jet stream, fading spots, and slower activity near the poles and say that our Sun is heading for a period of ‘hibernation’ – a period of solar quiescence in which sun spots (relatively dark patches on its surface which can be seen from Earth) disappear and the solar wind – the stream of electrically charged gases spewed in to space by our star – dwindles to nothing…

“An absence of sunspots is not an unprecedented situation. It has happened before, but not since the early 18th century.

“Lead researcher Frank Hill, of the National Solar Observatory, said: ‘The solar cycle is maybe going into hiatus, sort of like a summertime TV show.’

“While scientists don’t know why the sun is going quiet, all the signs are that it will.

“Dr Hill and his team have based their prediction on three changes in the sun spotted by scientific teams – weakening sunspots; fewer streams spewing from the poles of the sun’s corona; and a disappearing solar jet stream…”

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CATS is a conservative publication, almost free of advertising, and has appeared at least three times per week for the last six years. It consists of abstracts from the wider press, links to original sources, and sometimes, remarks by Jim Brody.